Is there anything novel about Zuckerberg's Jarvis?
No, there is nothing novel about this system. The main hurdle he had to pass was problems that you will face when your system has a lot of integration points across various APIs provided by different vendors with messy and often outdated documentation. 

As far as attention is concerned we live in a world where so called celebrities get attention for anything that they do. Remember that media have only one goal - More and more eyeballs aka more money and nothing else.